Madam Butterfly (1903-04)

Semi-staged performance with English surtitles

Cio-Cio San – Maki Mori (soprano), Pinkerton – Pene Pati (tenor), Suzuki – Hiroka Yamashita (mezzo-soprano), Sharpless – Christopher Purves (baritone), Goro – Christopher Lemmings (tenor), Kate – Carolyn Holt (mezzo-soprano), Yamadori/Bonze – Sanuel Pantcheff (baritone), Imperial Commissionaire – Jonathan Gunthorpe (bass), Yakuside – Matthew Pandya (bass), Cousin – Abigail Baylis (soprano), Mother – Hannah Morley (mezzo-soprano), Aunt – Abigail Kelly (soprano), Ufficiale – Oliver Barker (bass)

Thomas Henderson (director), Laura Jane Stanfield (costumes), Charlotte Corderoy (assistant conductor), Charlotte Forrest (repetiteur), Daniel Aguirre Evans (surtitles)

CBSO Chorus, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kazuki Yamada

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Saturday 29 June 2024

reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Photo (c) Yuji Hori

The current season by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra ended on an undoubted high with this performance of Madama Butterfly – if not Puccini’s greatest opera, then likely his most affecting and one with which Kazuki Yamada demonstrably feels an acute empathy.

Semi-stagings can be a mixed blessing, but Thomas Henderson fulfilled this task admirably through several strategically placed screens at either end and across the rear of the stage that enabled the singers to enter or exit without detriment to musical continuity. The costumes by Laura Jane Stanfield brought authenticity without risk of caricature, while whoever handled the lighting should be commended for so discreetly intensifying those emotional highpoints – notably when the ‘heroine’ meets her end in what felt as powerful visually as it did aurally.

The cast was a fine one and dominated (as it needed to be) by the Cio-Cio San of Maki Mori – her unforced eloquence and innate goodness evident throughout, while her only occasionally being overwhelmed by the orchestra underlined her technical assurance. A pity that Pene Pati was not on this level as, apart from his rather cramped tessitura in its higher register, his was a Pinkerton neither suave not alluring but precious and self-regarding – with barely a hint of remorse when forced to recognize the consequences of his actions. Hiroka Yamashita had all the necessary empathy as Suzuki, while Christopher Purves gave a memorable rendering of Sharpless – unsympathetic as to profession yet emerging as a hapless participant conveying real humanity, if unable to prevent what could hardly be other than a tragedy in the making.

Smaller roles were well taken, not least Carolyn Holt as a well-intentioned Kate and Samuel Pantcheff as a yearning if not over-wrought Yamadori. The CBSO Chorus gave its collective all in a contribution that goes a long way to defining the culture and atmosphere in a turn-of-century Nagasaki riven between its Oriental tradition and Occidental intervention. Otherwise, the CBSO was the star of this show in responding to Yamada’s direction, as disciplined as it was impulsive, with a precision and finesse maintained over even the most opulently scored passages. It is often overlooked just how wide-ranging Puccini’s idiom had by then become, with its impressionist and even modal elements duly subsumed into music whose Italianate essence is consistently enhanced while without sacrificing any of its immediacy or fervour.

Some 120 years on and attitudes to what this opera represents have inevitably changed, but it is a measure of Puccini’s theatrical acumen that anti-imperialist sentiment abounds in the narrative without drawing attention to itself conceptually or musically. Conducting with an audible belief in every bar, Yamada ably maintained underlying momentum – not least those potential longueurs in the initial two acts, while his handling of the third act made an already compact entity the more devastating in its visceral drama and ultimately unresolved anguish.

Overall, a gripping account of an opera too easy to take for granted as well as an impressive demonstration of the CBSO’s musicianship after just a year with Yamada at the helm. And, if ‘joy’ was in relatively short supply this evening, next season should more than make amends.

For information on the new CBSO season for 2024-25, click here